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Deconstructing the Game: Renegade Ops

Renegade Ops does this quite well with its first level, the one I mentioned above in my complaints area. The level is so good that the rest of the game had a hard time following it. In the very first level you are introduced to your commanding officer, a very open island environment to ride around and explore while tackling main missions and side missions alike. The side missions are given to you while in the heat of main missions and everything feels very hectic and intense. Actions seem to matter, and the battle feels very real.

Meanwhile the game introduces you to pretty much everything it needs to in one single level (minus the things I mentioned before). It is an almost perfect first level that works both as a great introduction to the game as well as an awesome demo to garner the excitement of the player to want to unlock it when the inevitable upsell button prompt comes up.

Game compensates for loose controls: As I mentioned before, the controls are a bit loose in RO, and with such a wide open environment with hills, ramps and other platforms, this could have been a recipe for disaster. But thankfully, despite the loose steering, the vehicle you drive is very stable and generally doesn’t have any trouble navigation wise with all of the different terrain. Even better is that if you do manage to flip the buggy, it automatically flips over in place so as to not cost the player much time and keep the potential for frustration down.

Upgrades are simple, but effective: You start off in RO with a plain machine gun and a character unique UN Squadron type super power to call an airstrike, let out a blast of electricity, etc. The special power is limited to the meter that has to recharge, so you are mostly packing the machine gun. It gets the job done for sure, but not as well as say, the awesome double or triple powered machine gun upgrade that you get with relative ease just killing lots of dudes. The triple powered gun does a lot more damage and doesn’t usually take too long to get from a fresh level start.

You get rewarded by doing well: This is something so fundamental and sounds like it would be in many more games, but it isn’t. Renegade Ops wants you to do well. Now the game is lax enough that if you keep messing up, it’s ok because you’ve got a lot of lives. But for the initiated that really want to feel like they can just kick the game’s ass, they get more points for playing the game in the most hardcore fashion.